Building management systems such as building automation systems, fire alarm systems and intrusion systems are often installed within premises such as commercial, residential, or governmental buildings. Examples of these buildings include offices, hospitals, warehouses, public infrastructure buildings including subways and bus terminals, multi-unit dwellings, schools or universities, shopping malls, government offices, and casinos.
Fire alarm systems typically include fire control panels that function as system controllers and distributed devices positioned throughout the buildings and connected to the panels. Some examples of distributed devices include fire detection/initiation devices such as smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, flame detectors, temperature sensors, and/or pull stations (also known as manual call points), and fire notification devices such as speakers, sounders, horns, bells, chimes, light emitting diode (LED) reader boards, and/or flashing lights (e.g., strobes).
The fire detection devices monitor the buildings for indicators of fire. Upon detection of an indicator of fire such as smoke or heat or flames, the distributed device is activated and a signal is sent from the activated distributed device to the fire control panel. The fire control panel then initiates an alarm condition by activating audio and visible alarms of the fire notification devices of the fire alarm system, which are also distributed around the building. Additionally, the fire control panel will also send an alarm signal to a monitoring station, which will notify the local fire department or fire brigade. In response to a fire alarm, occupants of the building are often trained and expected to evacuate to a designated safe location, or rally point.
Recently, it has been proposed to use connected services systems to monitor fire alarm systems. Connected services systems are remote systems that communicate with the building management systems and are sometimes administered by separate business entities than the owners and/or occupants of the buildings, which contain the building managements systems. For example, the connected services system can be administered by a building management system manufacturer and/or an entity providing service on the building management systems.
At the same time, occupants of these buildings commonly possess wireless-enabled user devices such as mobile computing devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, laptops, and/or smart watches), or even identification badges for access control systems, which wirelessly communicate with other devices using, for example, Bluetooth technology protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). During normal operation, many of these user devices wirelessly broadcast unique identification information such as serial numbers, media access control (MAC) addresses and/or universally unique identifiers (UUID) in order to facilitate establishing personal area networks (PAN), for example, with the other devices.